“I’d say it’s easier to thread a camel through a needle’s eye than get a rich person into God’s kingdom.” The Message
“It is more easy for a hippo to pass in the hole of a needle than a rich person to accept that God can be king over him.”
What was Jesus getting at in Luke 18: 25?
On Better Bibles Blog the other day, David Frank reflected on his return from Africa where he had been evaluating the translation of the Gospel of Luke into a language which up to now has had no Bible translation. This people group has no donkeys and no camels… so you can see some translation issues emerging…
This brings us to the verse in Luke that reads, in this language, “It is more easy for a hippo to pass in the hole of a needle than a rich person to accept that God can be king over him.” This is the English backtranslation of Luke 18:25. Interesting! Is this legitimate, or, for the sake of accuracy, do you have to insist that a word for “camel” be borrowed into the language to translate this verse? I have a hard time saying that the translation is not accurate and legitimate. I kind of like it, really. Now, obviously, if you were looking for a match for the Greek word κάμηλος, this target language word backtranslated as “hippo” wouldn’t seem to be a good match. But if you widen your perspective a bit, and don’t just look at words but rather at meanings in context, then in this particular context, a target language word for “hippo” is arguably a good translation of Greek κάμηλος.
As a non-linguist member of Wycliffe Bible Translators, I think this is a great story. Why not read the rest of it?
Good article. Two translation teams in Madagascar also used a type of cow for this famous verse, since that is probably the largest animal on the island, and is just as much a laughable image as a camel going through the eye of a needle. The team I was checking with last month originally had a loan word for camel here, but it was not easily understood, and didn’t elicit a reaction, whereas the image of a familiar, huge cow trying to go through the eye of a needle had people laughing out loud, which I’m sure would have been the case for Jesus’ audience.
Of course using a different animal in a metaphor or parable is very different to having Jesus ride into Jerusalem on a cow!! That is not acceptable as a translation, as David points out. It may be how local people travel, but it is not historically accurate, so the translators have to find a way of describing Jesus riding on a donkey, even if you have to borrow a word for donkey. Inevitably some aspects of a translation will seem ‘foreign’ to their audience because Jesus was not born in Africa, or in the UK or US, but into a particular country and culture in the Middle East.
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